On July 11 police had arrested muscular ex-con Jonathan Norman, 31, outside the lush Pacific Palisades, Calif., estate where the filmmaker lives with his wife, actress Kate Capshaw, and their seven children. According to police, Norman was carrying handcuffs, duct tape, a box cutter, razor blades and a black leather day planner stuffed with photographs of Spielberg and a list of his family members. "Disbelief was my first reaction," Spielberg, 50, told an L.A. grand jury this fall. In testimony released Dec. 17, the director said, "I have had a lot of fans and people asking me for autographs and wanting to send scripts, but I've never had someone stating their intention to do me harm.... I became completely panicked and upset, and very afraid to tell my wife."
Spielberg hired extra security guards to watch his home and to protect his children at school in London, where the production was based. The director said he also feared for the safety of his 68-year-old mother, who runs a kosher deli in L.A., and that he found it hard to concentrate on his work. "We had a thousand soldiers firing guns and firing blanks...," he said of filming on the Saving Private Ryan set. "I was very upset that he could have shown up in Ireland, put on [a] uniform [and] gotten access to a gun with live ammunition."
Norman, charged with one count of stalking and having failed to meet his $1 million bail, is in jail awaiting trial in Santa Monica Feb. 17. Like celebrity stalking victims before him, such as Madonna, skater Katarina Witt and actress Theresa Saldana, Spielberg is expected to testify that Norman's alleged actions put him in fear of great harm. (California's tough stalking law requires the prosecution to show that the actions of the accused put their victims in such fear.) More damning, however, may be the testimony of Norman's friend and former roommate Chuck Markovich, 34, an unemployed accountant. In October, Markovich told the grand jury that Norman, two days before being arrested, had mused about scaling Spielberg's fence in order to "go there to rape him."
But Markovich thinks Norman would never have hurt the director. He believes that his friend views Spielberg as a surrogate for Norman's own father, George, a Utah millionaire businessman who left his family to escape a prison sentence for bank fraud in 1973, when Jonathan was 6. (George, 67, spent the next 23 years on the lam; caught in 1996, he served nine months in prison.) His father's abandonment "had a profound effect on Jon," says a relative who asked not to be identified, adding that Jonathan had seen a therapist with his mother, Frances, 65.
In other ways, Norman's Salt Lake City upbringing was conventional. Frances, who divorced George in 1985, raised Jonathan and his three older brothers alone. Jonathan "took dance classes, liked jazz and took piano lessons," recalls the relative. After high school he went to UCLA, graduating in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in economics. Disliking office work, Norman managed bars and clubs around L.A. and for a short time attended law school in Santa Monica. In 1994 he moved in with Markovich. A year later Norman was arrested for attempting to run over a group of pedestrians with his car. Convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, he spent more than a year in prison.
After his release in November 1996, he started writing a screenplay and, last June, applied for a job at Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG studio. (He received only a form letter in response.)
Markovich says Norman went to the Spielberg estate simply to act out a scene from his screenplay for the surveillance camera at the gate: "He thought Spielberg would see it and say, 'This guy is creative.' Then he'd get discovered."
But Norman got discovered by police instead. Because of his prior conviction, he could face a sentence of 25 years to life. Even that prospect, however, offers little comfort to Spielberg, who says he has suffered nightmares since the arrest. "I'm very distraught over the possibility that this man could come out of jail and go right back on the warpath again," the director said in October, adding, "It's become an emotional obsession with me."
CYNTHIA SANZ
KEN BAKER and JEFF SCHNAUFER in Los Angeles and VICKIE BANE in Denver
- Contributors:
- Ken Baker,
- Jeff Schnaufer,
- Vickie Bane.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
